Amartya Kumar Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 and the Catalonia International Prize in 1997, is the seventeenth Honorary Doctor invested by the Rovira i Virgili University. During the ceremony, which took place on 28 June 2004, he was commended for his commitment to ethical economics, and the equality and liberty of individuals and societies.

Dr. Sen was sponsored by Agustí Segarra, who is professor of Applied Economics at the URV and director of the Centre for Business Research and Development of the Catalan Government’s Department of Work and Industry. Segarra related the professional and academic merits of Dr. Sen, who is a lecturer and researcher and was born in Santiniketan (India, 1933). He studied at the University of Calcutta and later at Trinity College in Cambridge. He has been a teacher at the Dehli School of Economics and the London School of Economics, and a lecturer at the universities of Berkeley, Oxford and Harvard.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to him for his contributions in the fields of welfare economics and equal opportunities, and the problems caused economic development, poverty, inequality and famine.